I think I'll start a game. A 2d game. About space, ships, building your own ships & stations. Exploring unknown areas. Would like to have it asynchronous multiplayer.

GameStart with a small ship. Mine asteroids. Get resources. Transport. Build bigger ships. Fight with other ships. Harvest parts. Optimize your ship power supplies, weapons, thrusters, shields. Find light speed engines & move to other parts of the galaxy. Build your own base, setup defenses. Resist to alien waves. Have the best base. Test you base against real players. Go to fight other player bases. Be a hero.

Possible scenarioYou have a small mining ship and work as mining asteroids. Sometimes, you get stuff, from old ships crashed on asteroids. One day, you find a transmitter, transmitting signal from what seems a big alien ship. You start looking for this ship...

You are the "big" ship top left, and enemies are the smaller ones.The current behavior : They try to face you (in order to fire sometime), and stay at a reasonable distance.To do this, they use the same commands as the player : Turn left/right, forward and backwards (they do not strafe atm). Of course, the result is quite different depending on where the thrusters are placed !

The two small needle ships have 6 thrusters so are really agile. Square ships are heavier with less thrusters, you can feel this the way they move.

, showing- The first placeholder pixel Art- Bullets (only pushing ships, not destroying anything yet)- Different ships designs, like the picture, leading to different behaviours

And if someone is interested (as this threads has few feedback), I would like some advices on pixel art about- Drawing ship parts (these are 8x8 textures)- Drawing universe background in a "pixel-art" style (you can see my first try with big stars)

Thank you ! No sound yet unfortunately. I have some small explosions on my version.

Yes Captain Forever is in the list of my references, it's a great game ! The difference with CF will be visible later, I have some ideas coming. There will be some gameplay about ship structure, next update will be about this. But the main difference it that I would like to have a more scalable gameplay, and build structures that last longer, like star-bases. So all I can say is...

These last days I worked on spaceship structure. As I want it to be break nicely, I built some kind of structure from ships described in text files. The result is not perfect yet, but it works, ships can be broken firing at them ^^

Here's an image of a ship structure, built automatically starting from cockpit and kinda pathfinding in the ship (I hilighted a ship in red to see arrows better).

- The important thing is that one element is only attached to a single other. This leads to quite "weak" structures, that is wat I want. If you break a block all the connected parts will be "freed" from main ship.

- Also, unlike Captain Forever, the ships will break down into smaller pieces (they won't be destroyed). These parts, in certain cases, will continue to live as independant ships (yes, like

: ). If a ship is broken in two parts, and each one has engines, they will try to flee (or even attack the player if they have weapons left).

As you can see, structure is already important. With a single shot on the side, I can easily break the big square in 2 parts, because its structure is made in "S". But after this, i shoot multiple time in the center, with nearly no effect. Fighting strategy coming...

As you can see, structure is already important. With a single shot on the side, I can easily break the big square in 2 parts, because its structure is made in "S". But after this, i shoot multiple time in the center, with nearly no effect. Fighting strategy coming...

Awesome! Would it be possible to make a feature article about this, since in the video it's a bit difficult to see what is actually happening. I'm interested since the structural stress and piece separation is something I've been considering as well.

I just realised that this system could be perfect for using evolutionary algorithms to design a myriad of enemy ship types. The seminal work is Evolved Creatures, but basically it could work like this:1. Set up an environment/fitness function you want the ship to excel at (e.g., distance travelled, resistance to being shot from the side, etc..)2. Generate 100 random ships 3. Loop (as long as you want)3a. Simulate each ship alone in the environment3b. Choose the top N ships from that run (e.g., N=10)3c. Create 100 children from the N ships via mutation, crossover, and direct copying

You might even be able to evolve simple controllers using tournament simulations..

Yesterday I spent 3 hours trying to figure out why Unity was not working, on none of my projects... I found that my antivirus quarantined the Unity compiler, "Mono.exe" ! Wtf !

About genome, interesting idea, maybe for generating ennemies ships. It was not the main roadmap idea, but I could give a try ! First step, I can try to generate random ships.

Because to do some genetics, I think I need genes, I mean description of how to generate ship. Like- Gene A brings more engines- Gene B adds more turrets"- Gene C builds more "massive" ships- Gene D adds some tail...This could be a lot of work. Any idea on how to proceed, what genes use ?